8 Things We Leaned From 'Westworld' Episode 2: "Chestnut"

Westworld's pilot episode spent impressively little time explaining itself—it dove right into its high-concept premise and expected viewers to keep up. The second episode, "Chestnut," which was released early today for HBO Now and HBO Go subscribers, feels more like an orientation. Thanks to the newly-introduced character of William (Jimmi Simpson), a reluctant first-time visitor to Westworld, we see the customer experience play out from the beginning, and gained some insight into the kinds of people that frequent this virtual reality resort.

Here are the eight key things we learned from "Chestnut:"

1) Westworld is a bespoke user experience.

The park's storylines are customizable and adjusted for each individual user, based largely on their medical history and their mental health. "We don't give you anything more than you can handle," an attractive maybe-robot lady tells William upon his arrival, quizzing him about his social anxiety. She explains that the storylines are tame at the park's centre, and become more intense the further out you move.

The mental health angle opens up a lot of intriguing questions: is money the only barrier to entry at Westworld? Are convicted criminals permitted? How about people with a history of psychosis? William's friend Logan (Ben Barnes), a regular customer, certainly seems like a sadistic piece of work. We know that customers can't hurt anybody they're not "supposed to" inside the park – but what about when they go back out into the real world, having spent days raping and killing at will inside Westworld?

2) Peter Abernathy's glitch may be contagious.

As was hinted last week, several hosts are showing the same warning signs as Abernathy before he crashed—Thandie Newton's brothel madam Maeve is having flashbacks to a horrifying attack from her past, while Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) keeps hallucinating a gravelly voice telling her to "remember." When the two women come face to face, Dolores seems to zone out momentarily and tells Maeve, "These violent delights have violent ends," echoing her father's words from last week.

One of the park's programmers, Elsie (Shannon Woodward) floats the theory that what Abernathy had is contagious, but Jeffrey Wright's head tech Bernard dismisses her concerns. Which brings us onto…

3) Bernard has a lot of secrets.

For one, he's been having clandestine meetings with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood)—it was his voice addressing her in the beginning and end of last week's episode. He's noticed that her way of thinking is "different" from the other hosts, and asks her various questions about her state of mind before ordering her to erase their interaction from her memory.

Bernard is also having an affair with corporate colleague Theresa (Sidse Babett Knudsen). What's interesting about that is that some viewers were speculating after the pilot that Theresa is a robot, based on her stiff body language and a strange line from Bernard about her eye (read up on that theory here). Clearly, this isn't a show in which having sex with a robot is unusual, but would it still be an acceptable thing to do in regular life, outside of the park?

4) The Man In Black has a mission

"That gentleman gets whatever he wants," a park employee says of Ed Harris's trigger-happy customer, who racks up a double-digit body count in this episode alone. What the Man In Black wants right now is to find "the deepest level of this game," and recruits a condemned man named Lawrence (Clifton Collins, Jr.) to help him uncover it. After getting his daily dose of casual sadism—he gleefully kills Lawrence's wife as a punishment for his lack of information—Lawrence's daughter unexpectedly gives him the direction he needs.

Another tidbit about the Man In Black? He doesn't plan on ever leaving Westworld. You have to imagine that customers getting in too deep and not wanting to go back to reality is a relatively common occurrence, but this guy seemingly has so much money that nobody's going to mess with him.

5) The hosts are subject to disease and decay just like humans.

The source of Maeve's "physical discomfort" this week turns out to be MRSA in her abdomen, aka a staph infection. As the douchey surgeon notes, this might be an indication that the park's not as sterile as it should be ("No wonder we have a fly problem").

The techs are also planning to de-commission Maeve, because she's having trouble attracting customers at the brothel—their nonchalance about this suggests that it's normal for hosts to eventually wear out, and be put out to pasture just as Peter was last week.

6) Dr Robert Ford has zero time for his employees' BS.

How satisfying was it to see Westworld's bratty narrative director Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) taken down a few pegs? He was so painfully smug about his extra-gratuitous new 'Odyssey On Red River' storyline ("It'll make Hieronymus Bosch look like he was doodling kittens!") until Anthony Hopkins' Ford calmly smacked him down.

Westworld's guests don't come back for the gore and thrills, Ford claims, but for the subtleties and details, for the feeling that "they've discovered something no one else had ever noticed before". This is a pretty transparent meta-commentary on writing television—come to Westworld for the gunslinging action, stay for the philosophical musing and Reddit-baiting mysteries—but it's also not clear that Ford's entirely right. A veteran guest like Logan is clearly coming back for the game's hedonistic thrills, not the deeper meaning. The Man In Black, on the other hand, seems to enjoy both.

7) Thandie Newton's Maeve might be the show's breakout character.

She's the focus of this episode as much as Dolores was in the pilot, and what seemed like a familiar madonna/whore dynamic with these two women has already become much more complicated. Those are the stereotyped roles they're forced into by Sizemore's writing—but now Maeve and Dolores are both on the brink of realizing that their reality is a ruse.

Newton is phenomenal here, playing out the distinct versions of Maeve's seduction anecdote as her personality is re-calibrated, and creating a visceral sense of terror as she wakes up mid-surgery in the lab. If traumatic memories seem to be the ones that are resurfacing for the hosts, then the memory of seeing James Marsden's "body" being cleaned up and re-programmed is bound to haunt Maeve even after being wiped.

8) Androids really do dream (electric sheep TBC).

According to Elsie, the hosts can't dream, but are given the concept of dreams, to explain away any memories of the lab they might accidentally retain. That accounts for Dolores' "dream" from last week, but not for Maeve's terrifying nightmare this week—the conversation about William's mental health was a neat setup for both.

"Dreams are mainly memories," Elsie points out, explaining why the hosts can't truly dream. "Can you imagine how fucked we'd be if these poor assholes ever remembered what the guests do to them?" Hmm. Imagine that.

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